Until now, my sighs have been reserved for Mahmoud Darwish, Rumi, Hafez and Pablo Neruda: aside from this quartet, I have alternated between gasps of frustration and substantial eye-rolling.

But that will change and today marks it thusly, with a marvellously poignant poem by Imtiaz Dharker:

The Right Word

Outside the door,
lurking in the shadows,
is a terrorist.

Is that the wrong description?
Outside that door,
taking shelter in the shadows,
is a freedom fighter.

I haven’t got this right .
Outside, waiting in the shadows,
is a hostile militant.

Are words no more
than waving, wavering flags?
Outside your door,
watchful in the shadows,
is a guerrilla warrior.

God help me.
Outside, defying every shadow,
stands a martyr.
I saw his face.

No words can help me now.
Just outside the door,
lost in shadows,
is a child who looks like mine.

One word for you.
Outside my door,
his hand too steady,
his eyes too hard
is a boy who looks like your son, too.

I open the door.
Come in, I say.
Come in and eat with us.

The child steps in
and carefully, at my door,
takes off his shoes.

© Imtiaz Dharker 2007

The more it is read, the deeper it becomes – evoking child soldiers, perspectives (freedom fighter? Guerilla? Militant? Or just child?) and conflict.

In short, it is masterful.

Exchange between Man and I, last night:

Layla: <excited> I bought three DVDs earlier!

Man: <Secretly hoping to hear the word ‘Rambo’ in at least one> Oh, what?

L: Lebanon and…

M: <thinks: please say Rambo, please say Rambo…>

L: Mother India! It’s a classic!

M: <Turns in slow motion from stove, a look so murderous that Voldemort and Sauron would clutch each other’s robes and weep shrilly.>

L: What? It’s going to be awesome! Wha…

M: Mother India? You have to be kidding, right? My God. Why Mother India? Why not Mother Pakistan?!

L: Mwahaha. There is not one. You must capitulate to my Bollywood power. That, and Mela, 1948.

M: <Sullen silence, denoting disappontment and resignation.>

Cue: Waltz with Bashir.

All of which prompts me to propose the Obedient Husbands Club, which will fall under the umbrella of the Wilfully Disobedient Wives Club.

Zebulon Simentov, who chose to stay behind when his wife and children emigrated to Israel, achieved fame because of a raging feud with the country’s second-last Jew that ended when his rival died in 2005.

A lattice of corrugated iron Star of Davids marks Afghanistan’s only working synagogue, a white-washed, two-story building tucked into a side street in the center of Kabul.

Kebabs, carpets and flowers are served and sold on the ground floor of the synagogue, which has been transformed into businesses over the last 18 months by the country’s sole remaining Jew, who lives upstairs in a small pink room.

“Some of my customers know this is the synagogue and know about the Jew upstairs, but they don’t care and neither do I. I pray my way and he prays his way. I see him as a friend, someone to spend time with,” Ahmad said of his landlord, sitting beside large black and silver wall-hangings depicting Mecca. [Continues...]

One of the saddest vestiges of the conflicts has been the erosion of faiths aside from Islam: the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, the persecution of the Baha’is who thence fled to neighbouring Pakistan, and the increasingly clandestine practice of Christianity among 500 to 8,000 Afghans.

It is a quick (mis)step to indicate the rise in Islam and the Talibanization of Afghanistan as the impetus behind the decline of the faiths: many diminished following the war with the Soviets – animists, for example, suffered during deforestation by the Russian forces.

Zebulon Simentov is a remnant of a happier time, when Jews thrived alongside their Muslim and Christian brothers across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

I wonder if we will see such unity ever again.

Zia Mohyeddin‘s voice is divine – almost usurps Stephen Fry in my affections – and had me chortling guiltily.

So, so true

A dozen or so participants, mostly women activists experienced in fighting misogynist mullahs, exchanged views, cracked jokes and slammed the sermonizing clergy. Recounting acts of rebellion, many remembered the calumny they suffered for opposing oppressive patriarchy and for calling the bluff of the champions of orthodox Islam.

These feminists are not the bra or burqa-burning type. They believe in the core values of Islam, yet want to remove the cobwebs in the path of Muslim women. “We work under the framework of Islamic principles and Indian constitution,” declares Soman, one of the founding members of Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, an advocacy group that has 24,000 members across the country. The biggest achievement of Andolan, Soman says, is that now government agencies invite its members before framing schemes aimed at uplifting Muslim women. [Read on...]

Held between 21 and 23 May, the breadth of the conference was impressive, exploring:

Personal narratives: How participants’ interest in the issue of Muslim women’s subordination and the need for the empowerment evolved;

Reflections on the Muslim religious and political leadership, the Muslim and the ‘mainstream’ media, agencies of the state, political parties, NGOs, and ‘secular’ women’s groups and movements to issues of Muslim women’s marginality and the quest for their social, economic and educational advancement;

The need to critique and challenge patriarchal understandings of Islam, and to promote alternate Islamic discourses based on gender equality and justice, and the prospects as well as hurdles in the path of evolving such alternate discourses;

The task of foregrounding Muslim women’s concerns and issues at the policy-making level, in the media and in the agenda of Muslim organisations;

Linking Muslim women’s initiatives and struggles for justice and equality within the broader Muslim community to ongoing efforts to justice and empowerment for Muslims as a whole in the wider context of debates about democracy and social justice;

Linking Muslim women’s struggles for justice and equality to the need for reforms in the current regime of Muslim Personal Law, and how this task can be furthered with the help of experiences of reforms in personal law statutes in several Muslim countries;

A critique of dominant notions of multiculturalism and minority rights that pay scant attention to internal hierarchies within marginalised communities (i.e. minorities within minorities), based on class, caste and gender,  and the possibilities of linking Muslim women’s struggles to those of other struggles within the broader Muslim community, such as that of Dalit and OBC Muslims.

In particular, I am inspired by the defiant stance of Sheeba Aslam Fehmi, who challenged potential criticism with a steely “Let there be fatwas on me.”

I shall be keeping an eye out for other Islamic feminist events and hope to post more in the coming months.

Considering this year’s post, I rather hoped to move towards the positive: a celebration, if you will, of what we have acheived.

And we have: women have campaigned, transcended and broken boundaries stupendously.

BUT.

Have we changed the world to render it safe from the whims, urges and greed, be they violent or otherwise, of mankind?

We can celebrate, but it seems only for a moment: there is still so much to do: from wage inequality and the latest European measure to raise car insurance for women, but lower it for men, to the heinous crimes of rape, female circumcision, honor killings, human trafficking, domestic violence, corrective rape, expressing sexual orientation,  female infanticide… the list goes on and inexorably, depressingly, on.

Thanks to the media the abrogation of human rights has become synonymous with certain regions and cultures: yet it is not so.

In a new move the United Kingdom is attempting to tone down the definition of domestic violence within the nascent European initiative, The Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence.

For Home Secretary, Theresa May (yes! A woman, no less!), it is a step too far that a man battering his wife should be considered “a violation of human rights.”

Rather, it “constitutes a serious obstacle for women’s enjoyment of human rights.”

That’s right: your rights are still intact, only you (and your children) may not enjoy them as much if four ribs are broken, your eyes are swollen shut and the bastard is banging down the bedroom door in a gin-fuelled frenzy.

Moreover:

[The UK] also wants to alter the document so that it applies only in peace time, and not during armed conflict — a surprising request, given the widespread international use of rape as a weapon of war. [Source]

Another stirling move: in peace time – according to May – you less likely to enjoy your rights, while in wartime – well, you’re screwed, literally and figuratively.

100 years after the inception of International Women’s Day we continue to be subjugated – only this time, women are implicit, too.

The night is mine: I love sunsets, while loathing sunrises; I find ethereal mysticism in the dusk, while  the very words ‘dusk’, ‘twilight’ and ‘gloaming’ hold auditory and visual allure.

The full moon renders the high sun redundant in its splendour and my memories of Jordan are not of the radiant heat, but the coldness of the moon.

As the plane ascended from the second transfer en route to Amman, it climbed through the impenetrable clouds over Holland.

Suddenly, it broke free and the night became tangible: bounteous curves of varying shades of navy, black, blue and dark silver cascaded as far as the eye could see, lit by the swollen moon.

I gasped, the memory was forever savoured and my conversion to Nyx affirmed.

In Morocco, as the bus trundled through the desert darkness and passengers snored, snaffled or sighed through the inexorable miles, my forehead relentlessly pressed the cold glass, craning at a constellation so vivid that it could have been a shower of diamonds.

Last summer, we lay on a hill above the city at midnight and I discovered  the mesmerizing circular movements of the satellites could be beheld for hours.

The darkness envelopes, anonymizes, silences and comforts.

It is a void onto which we can project dreams, hidden smiles, summon demons of our own creation and scream into our night terrors.

It is freedom, realized.

At least, it should be.

When I walk home late from the office and the trees lurch from the shadows and a badger strolls across the empty road, I am no longer in awe.

I do not linger with slow steps as I would wish.

Rather, I briskly walk, scouting for shapes, sounds that would belie somebody.

I fear the night, but even more I loathe my trepidation.

Just as the heartbeat quickens when headlights slowly approach, correspondingly my rage intensifies that as women we must entertain this anxiety.

As I walked back late last night and a car cruised by, I lamented my lateness.

Then I corrected the thought: I should stay late – I should be a presence on the street and not let the fear win.

Our presence as women is a reassurance to other women walking alone: dangerous though it is who has not exchanged a relieved smile and nod when the shadow ahead becomes female?

The notion of reclaiming the night is a poignant one: night has become synonymous with menace, the bastion of sexual predators, men in crawling cars, and corner-lingerers.

Putting aside their motivations, we must ask the question: why must they claim the night? Why should they have the monopoly of those hours?

Many universities have started buddy-schemes in which individuals can call and request company to walk home.

It is a damning indictment on contemporary society that we are no longer safe to walk alone and, full of pique, I thwart that.

I face my terrors, screw my courage to the sticking-place and convert fear to rage.

Replacing ‘Damn, what the…’ with ‘To hell with you, this is my time, too!’ and ‘What if that man tries something?’ with ‘Just try it. You won’t walk for a month. At least.’ nocturnal empowerment is born.

As women we confront marginalization economically, professionally and in certain cultures, socially.

Let us not be marginalized by the night.

Let us take back the night.

Via Saudiwoman.

Now there is irkafirka, which takes those random bits of tweetery and renders them cartoonish, to wit:

And beneath each image the original Tweet lies, banal and unique by turns.

Quite new, the collection is ever growing and is a delightful addition to the Tweetosphere.

So, Tweet something utterly quirky and it could just be conjured in bright irkafirka colours.

Sounds good to me